The Unit of work aims to assist Stage 2 students in the construction of a Power Point presentation that will include written text, visual images and voice audio. In doing so, students will focus on the Human Society and Its Environment outcome CCS2.1 Describes events and actions related to the British colonisation of Australia and assesses changes and consequences. The unit consists of ten lessons that function interdependently as they develop student understanding of British Colonisation in an interactive and stimulating manner.
At the start of this lesson, the teacher explicitly explains to students the goal which they are working towards over the next 10 lessons. That is, the creation of a rich multimodal text that will contain a factual recount on British colonisation, appropriate accompanying pictures and an audio file. This multimodal text will be displayed via a Power Point presentation.
Students are then introduced to the topic of Colonisation via an interactive website (see resource 1).
Students explore the interactive website, specifically analysing the written and visual elements.
Students fill in a KWL chart that provides a foundation for the upcoming learning in the unit.
Students are introduced to visual grammar via three images relating to British colonisation (see resource 3).
Using these images, specific visual elements are highlighted such as social distance, narrative action images and salience.
This lesson will familiarise students with the visual grammar they will need to harness when finding images for their multimodal text on British colonisation.
Students have now learnt about the written and visual grammar required to create a multimodal text on British colonisation.
Students have also been introduced to a multimodal text and have identified various features of its composition.
This lesson combines student's knowledge from the previous four lessons, as students create a storyboard scaffold that will assist them in making their final multimodal Power Point text (see resource 5).
The storyboard scaffold focuses on combining the written and visual aspects required for the multimodal text.
In this lesson students are split into 5 groups of 5. Students will be working in these groups for the next 5 lessons as they collaboratively work to create their Power Point on British colonisation.
Lesson 6
Students are now armed with enough information to start work on their multimodal text about British colonisation.
In this lesson, students engage in independent work, researching the topic of British colonisation via books, websites, artworks and other mediums available within the classroom.
After researching, students form into their groups (established in lesson 5) and pool their research together.
Students type up their research notes in a word document on the computer.
Lesson 7
Students use their research gathered in the previous lesson and begin to write a factual recount on the British colonisation of Australia.
Students must employ the correct written grammar techniques of a factual recount - features that were explored in lesson 2.
Notes from lesson 2 will be displayed on the IWB.
The factual recounts are proof read and edited by the group.
After the teacher has seen the final factual recount, students employ the storyboard scaffold explored in lesson 5 and begin to place their written text in a Power Point document.
Lesson 8
Students look at their factual recount written in the previous lesson and begin to look for images on British colonisation that support the text (a concept explored in stage 1).
When finding visual images, students must keep in mind the visual features explored in lesson 3.
Notes from lesson 3 will be displayed on the IWB.
As students find appropriate images, they begin to upload them into the Power Point which already contains the factual recount.
Lesson 9
All groups should now have a Power Point on British colonisation that contains written and visual literacy elements.
In this lesson, students are taught how to upload audio into their Power Point presentation.
Students in the group take turns to read the factual recount aloud.
Once this has been recorded, students begin to split up the recording and place each section on the right slide in the Power Point.
Lesson 10
Students refine their Power Points and make last minute changes to fonts, colour schemes, image positioning.
Power Points are presented to the class. Special guests, including other teachers, parents or carers, historians and/or the principal will be invited to view the presentations.
Lesson 1
Lesson 2
Lesson 3
Lesson 4
Lesson 5
Lesson 6
Lesson 7
Lesson 8
Lesson 9
Lesson 10